A Life Denied
by StarWitch
Summary: When he first changed, what went through his head?


            I hate her.

            I hate that cursed enchantress.

            I hate this form.

            I want her to come back.  I have to explain to her that I am a good man, a gentle man.  I wish I could have her speak to those in the castle.  They would tell her so, that I am good.  That I do my duty, that I am moral and just, that I remember their birthdays. ANYTHING!

            I would tell her anything by now, to change back again.  I think the others would too.  Even Mrs. Potts, who hates it when any of us lie.  She would lie to save her son.  What was his name again?  I can't recall.  He hides from me now, this monster I am become.  He hides with his mother.  Her hair has turned white since the last time she came to bring me from the nursery to my room now.  She was my nana when I was little, my governess when I grew older.  Would Mrs. Potts have lied to save me as she would with her son?

            Only she, Cogsworth, and Lumiere will approach me now.  Mrs. Potts brought Lumiere.  Since the spell was centered on love, she thought he could instruct me.  Lumiere insisted no one could instruct how to love.  Cogsworth said Lumiere couldn't instruct anyone in anything.  The fights between them are much more even now that they are the same height.  Mrs. Potts can't shake her head anymore, but somehow I knew she was.  I couldn't stand to be with them, so I left for the balcony in the West Wing.

            The cursed balcony.  My room.  The place the enchantress appeared to me in all her majesty, more regal than even the faded memories of my parents holding court.  I nearly threw her out then.  It is my room; no one may enter but me.  At one time my parents could.  Not anymore.  It is my sanctuary.  How dare she enter my sanctuary, HOW DARE!  But she halted me in my tracks, I snarling for her to leave.  She looked at me as if I were some peasant worthy of her pity, me!  Her eyes were green as emeralds and just as bright.  Her voice was like the wind in a garden.

            "You do not love anyone, do you?  No mercy or compassion at all."

            It was a fact to her.  The same as the sun rising, or flowers budding and becoming blooms and dying.  I could not have disagreed, even though I wanted to.  She held me in her power, which somehow felt like the waxy leaves of bushes.  It had been a long time since I had been in a garden.

            "I give you another chance," the enchantress whispered.  "I leave you my prize."  Her hand held out a red red rose bud.  "You must find love, young prince, before the last petal of this rose falls on your twenty first birthday."

            "How can you make me!" I shouted.  "I am a prince!  I can do as I please!  I could banish-"

            She laughed, a burbling watery sound.  "You cannot banish me, young prince.  It is impossible," she said.  "And make you find love I shall.  But a reason must be left for you to try."  Her laughing green eyes grew chill.  Goosebumps rose on my arms.  Sparks began to glitter at my feet, then glow, then rage up into a column about me to hide the beautiful enchantress in her green gown.

            "Rise up, flame, and burn away to what he truly is!" her voice chimed, echoing in my room.

            My flesh began to bubble, the sharp stings of flame and thorn popping the blisters and letting cloudy fluid flow over my body.  Where the liquid trickled I felt stiff, as if the drops had dried into a restricting shell about me.  My bones contorted and ground about their joints as if I was nothing but a doll in a malicious child's hands.  I screamed.

            I was on the floor.  The red carpet of my room pressed to my face.  I pushed myself to my feet, wobbling as the ground seemed to shift about me.  I glared at the woman across the room, brilliant in her deep green dress.  "You have no right to touch me," I told her.  My voice growled as one with a cold does. Had she made me sick?

            She smiled.  In any other creature, that smile would be beautiful.  On her, it was a mockery.  "It is late for that," she commented.

            The door slammed open behind me.  I turned to see Lumiere, Cogsworth, and some of the other en of the castle at the door.  Mrs. Potts peered in worriedly.  All gasped at me.  Me, their master!  I pointed to them, ready to tell them to leave the room-

            It was not my hand.

            I could not have been my hand.  It was thick, covered in brown fur, clawed, and bore pads like those on a dog's feet.  I opened my hand.  That thing masquerading as a hand opened.  I made a fist.  It made a fist.   I grabbed the mirror from my table.  The thing did the same.

            It was my hand.

            Lumiere was the first to find his voice, as always.  "You cannot do such to the Master!" he called in that odd accent of his.

            The enchantress seemed both amused and worn out.  "I just have," she said to the collected service, "and he shall remain so until he finds love.  If he does not, he shall be thus forever."

            Mrs. Potts gasped.  Lumiere looked dumbstruck.  Cogsworth cried out, "He won't remain thus at all!  We will change him back, somehow, and curses on you for making more unnecessary work!"

            The enchantress looked sad.  "Now you may not do that," she said softly.  "I cannot allow it.  I am sorry."

            She waved her hand.  A wave of green ran out and washed out the world into a green nothingness.  I fell to my knees, vaguely relieved to find solid ground below my knees.  Eventually, I blinked the green from my eyes.  The enchantress was gone.

            So was everything I knew.  The servants were almost unrecognizable in the talking objects left behind.  Much of the castle was gone too, the shining sunlit place of my childhood.  Left behind was a gloomy place.  I wandered the first day, trying to find anything familiar.  Even my parents' room was gone, changed to a place full of mirrors showing me I wasn't their golden little boy at all, but a monster in this place sacred to them.

            I hated the mirrors most.  In those I looked and my features, my face, were trapped in this mask that reminded me of my worst nightmares.  My hair had been exchanged for matted fur, my ears hidden beneath a wicked pair of horns that would make a demon proud.  My mouth was the worst, a pile of sharp teeth in a lipless hole.  My eyes were still the same, but that made it worse, for it meant it was I in the mirror.

            Mrs. Potts found me raging in my room, tearing apart the carpet I no longer felt, the bed I couldn't sleep in, the portrait of me that was not me.  She tried to calm me, just as she had when she found me crying when my parents died.  I refused to strike her, although I wanted to, but I feared cracking her delicate porcelain body.  What happens if one of them is broken?

            That is something I should have told that witch.  I haven't had an easy life at all, what has she to complain about survival?  My parents died when I was only eight.  That was Mrs. Potts's most difficult lesson for me: that nobility did not protect one from the common falls of life.  We could get sick or hurt.  We could even die.

            The fever had been a vicious one.  I lay sick in bed for almost a week, nursed by one of the maids.  Sometimes Mrs. Potts visited, but usually she was nursing her baby boy or my parents.  When I could finally stand again, I went to my parents' room.  Mrs. Potts was there, crying.  She took me in her arms, as if I was her son, and explained that my parents had died.  That was the last time I cried in front of a servant.

            It was just after that I became the lord of the castle in truth.  I acted as a master should act, giving orders I remembered from the times I saw my parents in court.  Eventually, I even began to make my own orders.  It was a strange feeling, seeing Mrs. Potts and Lumiere and all of them who had been in control of me all my life now running under my command.  Eventually, though, commands lost that first glow of wonder and became commonplace.

            I had been in control since I was eight, and I had done a good job.  The country prospered, the people were happy, and I grew used to leading.  Then this happened.

            Would she really leave me like this until I was twenty-one?  I'm only sixteen.  My majority is so far off it might as well be forever.  She would leave me like this forever?  She is a witch.

            Who is she to judge me!  She hasn't the feeling to see she is cruel beyond belief.  What has she done to be so much higher than me, what has she survived?  I survived as a child, how could she judge me?  HOW?

            I hate her.  I shall hate her until we both die, and I shall make sure she goes with me to death for ruining my life.  I was a good man.  I _am_ a good man.

            I hate her.


End file.
